Sadamasa Motonaga

Sadamasa Motonaga (元永定正, 1922 — 2011) was one of the most distinctive and internationally visible members of the first generation of the Gutai Art Association. Born in Iga, Mie Prefecture, on 26 November 1922, he initially trained as a manga cartoonist and worked as a working illustrator for some years before turning seriously to fine-art painting. The cartoonist's eye for shape, colour, and humour stayed with him through his subsequent painting and printmaking and gave his mature work its characteristic combination of formal rigour and joyful, child-friendly affect.

Motonaga apprenticed himself in the early 1950s to Jiro Yoshihara — the future founder of Gutai — and joined the Gutai Art Association in 1955, the year of the group's foundation. He participated continuously in Gutai activities through 1971, the year before Yoshihara's death and the formal dissolution of the group. Within Gutai he developed a series of characteristic works including 'Water Sculpture' — vinyl bags filled with painted water suspended in outdoor exhibition installations — and made significant innovations in the application of acrylic paint via airbrush, producing the soft-edged tonal gradients that became a signature of his mature practice.

In 1966 Motonaga was awarded a Japan Society fellowship and spent a year in residence in New York. The American year was decisive for his subsequent style: he returned to Japan with a new sensibility that blended his Gutai-period material experimentation with the visual vocabulary of American hard-edge abstraction and Pop. His mature paintings of the 1970s through to his death used flat fields of bright airbrush-applied acrylic in cartoon-derived shapes — ovals, triangles, lines, and irregular biomorphic forms — set against contrasting grounds. The combination is at once rigorously abstract and immediately readable as cheerful, accessible image-making, a tone that informed both his fine-art career and his parallel work as a children's-book illustrator and author.

Motonaga's printmaking is the largest single body of editioned work by a first-generation Gutai painter. He worked closely with the Gendai Hanga Center (Tokyo) between 1977 and 1984, producing extensive series of silkscreen prints that translated his characteristic shape-vocabulary and airbrush-derived gradients into editioned form. Editions are typically issued at 100 to 150 impressions per image and span the full range of his late chromatic interests. He won the Grand Prix at the 4th International Print Biennale in Seoul in 1983, one of the principal prizes for Asian printmaking in that era, and his prints have been collected by the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, the National Museum of Art Osaka, and many other institutions. Whitestone Gallery currently lists six Motonaga works including silkscreen prints and Acrylic-on-canvas paintings.

Alongside his fine-art career Motonaga published more than thirty children's picture books, several of which won major Japanese illustration prizes. The picture-book practice was not a sideline but a continuation of the same visual-language project that animated his paintings and prints: bright, accessible shapes that take seriously the perceptual experience of children as much as of adults. He continued making both paintings and prints into his late eighties and died in 2011 at the age of 88.